League of Legends pimpage

If you are attending PAX and do not play League of Legends, I would totally take your Sivir skin code. Because, hey, you’re not using it, right? ;) [Update: thank you Chris Roddam! I am hereby coded. If anyone else has a code but no use for it, two of our blogger friends in the comments were also interested.]

And if you are not playing League of Legends, I would also totally take your referral credit if you wanted to try it out. Because, hey, free champion if 10 of you do, right? ;)

Long weekend for me, so I’m going to beat up some bots right now. Cheers!

If you have ever played DotA, this is the next generation. There are at least 3 other competing implementations (DotA 2, Demigod, Heroes of Newerth), but this has been the most successful and popular. If you have never played any version of DotA, wow, you really ought to. The basic notion:

Take an RTS and play only the hero unit (champion). You have two teams of five champions, fighting outwards from their base, planning to destroy the enemy base. They operate in three lanes, each with towers; these defenses also serve to mark progress. In each lane, you have waves of enemies continuously spawn on either side and crash against each other, even except for the champions’ influence. You level from participating in these minion fights, buy items with the gold you receive, and gradually switch to primarily champion-vs-champion fights in the endgame as you mix large group fights with ambushes and attempts to push into the enemy’s base.

A full round takes 30-60 minutes. They have added bots for PvE, and they are almost ready to release a new map (Arathi Basin).

It’s one of those games that can be hard to describe in a way that sounds fun. If I said it was like playing a team based FPS except on a RTS map from an overhead perspective, would that be interesting?

I think what makes LoL stand out for me above the others is that you HAVE to depend on your team. It’s balanced so that you generally will not win a 4 vs 5 match. There is no superstar that dominates the game.

Also, at 80+ champions to pick from, there’s a bit of a Pokemon-like effect in deciding who you want to use.